The following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, please view my advertising page.

Five weeks ago, the Vice President of Infolinks, Tomer Treves, contacted me asking me to try their In-Text advertising network as a publisher.

I replied saying I wasn’t interested as I had previously used other In-Text advertising networks such as Kontera and IntelliTXT with horrible results (incredibly low payouts, irrelevant ads, etc.).

Tomer was persistent and replied by saying that “Infolinks is different”. He then offered me a rather significant up-front signing bonus if I were to run Infolinks on my network of sites for a year. His sign-up bonus offer was indeed significant and I did think about it carefully as it would have made a nice additional down payment on the house I’ll be buying.

However, I really had a strong negative disposition towards In-Text advertising networks and decided to decline his offer – after all, a year is a long time. In response, Tomer decided to buy a paid review from my blog, which was a smart move as it basically forced me to try Infolinks 🙂

Even though I was negatively biased against In-Text advertising, I tested Infolinks for my review with a fresh state of mind, even optimism.

Here than is my review of Infolinks:

Infolinks is an In-Text advertising network that pays out on a CPC basis. In-Text ads are those ads you typically see when keywords are double underlined. When hovered over with the cursor, a small ad, which is supposed to be relevant to the contextual text that is linked, will appear.

I ran Infolinks on two of my websites, CookingForums.net and Movie-Vault.com (now removed, in case you’re looking for the ads), for 2 weeks in order to get a decent amount of sample data.

Signing Up & Implementation

Unlike many ad networks, Infolinks welcomes all legitimate (obviously nothing illegal or offensive) websites, big or small. There are no minimum requirements for page views or visitors which right off the bat makes Infolinks a very desirable solution for small website owners.

Applying to Infolinks was very easy and I believe I was approved the next day, if not instantly (I really can’t remember unfortunately). However, while account approval may be quick, you will then also require separate approval for each website you add to your account.

Unfortunately, in my case, this turned out to be a bit of a hassle. I had correctly added the ad JavaScript code to my sites, which was required for verification purposes, but customer support kept telling me I didn’t add it. After several e-mails and 3 days later, they finally apologized and admitted that I was correct and had added the code correctly. Their apology was sincere and they approved my sites.

Adding Infolinks to your site is as easy as it gets, simply adding a snippet of JavaScript to the bottom of your HTML code, right before the </html> tag. Below is how my JavaScript code looks:

Customization

First, you can decide which portions of your website you want to allow Infolinks to link. This is a vital customization feature; without it, you could have important areas such as your navigational sections turned into ads which would be extremely confusing and frustrating to your visitors.

By default, if no tags are implemented, the Infolinks ads will appear in all appropriate sections. The boundary tags are simple to implement, simply requiring either a <!–INFOLINKS_ON—> or <!–INFOLINKS_OFF—> in appropriate sections. This may be a bit of a pain to implement in certain CMS’s, however.

Another way to customize your ads is to take advantage of the Advanced Customization Wizard. The wizard, as seen below, allows you to easily customize the colours of your links, choose the underline style, set your website’s category, and set the ad saturation level you want to appear per page.

You can also customize your ads by adding and editing variables within the JavaScript code. This is nice for power users, but there appears to be no option to set the underline style through this method, so you’ll have to use the wizard if you wish to customize that.

Furthermore, making modifications to the JavaScript code by modifying the variables does not appear to update the ads instantly, while using the wizard does appear to show instant changes.

Customer Support

I already mentioned the little hiccup with customer support during the website approval above, but that was really minor and they did apologize rather sincerely.

However, I did have another run-in with customer support when my forum members on CookingForums.net were complaining about a bug. Apparently, Infolinks created a bug on CookingForums that prevented the back button in Internet Explorer from working – you had to click it 3 times in order for it to function correctly.

There was no way I was going to keep running Infolinks on my site if it caused such a severe user interface issue, so I quickly removed it from the site.

However, the next day, Tomer e-mailed me stating:

“I heard you had a bug on one of your sites so you’ve removed the Infolinks script. Despite being rare, bugs happen (especially with IE), and we’re proud of being very fast to fix anything. Recently, for example, we were the first ad network to overcome a problem that PayPal had with customers in India (you can easily Google this).

In your case, even though you didn’t approach our support (as far as I know), our monitoring team found your problem, duplicated it, and in fact fixed it already…”

While I did contact support about it, Tomer was correct and the bug was fixed very quickly so I re-added Infolinks to CookingForums the next day to proceed with the testing.

While the bug was certainly annoying, I do give them credit for fixing it so fast.

However, as is mentioned below, there was also a bug on Movie-Vault.com which I notified customer support about 10 days ago. Two days later, they replied, telling me that they “forwarded this issue to their technical team for further investigation”, but I haven’t heard anything since then (8 days ago) and the bug remains.

Therefore, I think their customer support needs work. It’s not horrible, but I think they should follow up on issues more and perhaps be a bit more proactive.

Bugs Galore

The main reason I was so antagonistic about In-Text advertising when Tomer first contacted me, apart from the historically low payouts from other similar networks, was the bugs and irrelevant ads that these networks tend to have.

Below are 3 bugs that appeared on both sites I tested Infolinks on:

Irrelevant Ads

The whole point of contextual advertising is to provide higher targeted and relevant ads which benefits everybody including the advertiser, publisher, ad network, and visitor.

While some ads were indeed relevant to the keywords they targeted, I found that 90% of them were not. The majority of them appeared to be ads for search engines or “top sites” which basically tell visitors to find more information on x keyword(s) by using their search engine or viewing the top sites for x keyword(s). This is not relevancy, and does not engage users to click on them.

Since Infolinks is a CPC network and you only get paid when visitors click on the ads, relevancy is of HUGE importance to publishers. This can not be understated.

I am listing this as a bug since Infolinks states on their front page:

No Images

While this may not technically be a bug, it certainly looks like one to visitors: I would estimate that roughly 90% of the ads don’t have images, as seen below:

In many cases, this is likely due to their system not being able to grab or cache a screenshot of the website, possibly because the page does not actually even exist until it is visited.

Whatever the reason may be, the fact remains that the majority of ads do NOT have images. This makes the ads look trashy and unprofessional. I can understand situations where a screenshot may not be dynamically possible, but there is no reason why there should be a blank “Image Not Available” placeholder graphic showing. Require a default image or simply do not show any image and just the text, but don’t show a blank placeholder image as that is just too unprofessional.

Perhaps Infolinks may even want to consider requiring advertisers to submit images with their ads ala Facebook instead of taking website screenshots dynamically. This would dramatically improve CTR in most cases anyway.

HTML Tags Showing

This one is definitely a bug. Some ads, perhaps as many as 20% in fact, show HTML tags in the description and title instead of stripping them out or implementing the actual tags, as can be seen in the screenshot below:

This is yet another thing that makes the ads look unprofessional, unenticing to click on, and just rather silly.

When you combine the 3 bugs above, it really shows that Infolinks has a lot of work to do.

Link Style Bug

This bug appeared only on my Movie-Vault.com website, not CookingForums.net, and only appeared on the front page news posts. This was somewhat odd, since when you viewed the same content on the individual news pages, the bug was not present; it was only present on the front page news posts.

Basically, the bug had the ad links incorrectly positioned. The underline links were often several pixels below where they should have been, and were sometimes directly through text.

An example is shown below:

Now, it’s possible that this is more an issue with the fact that Movie-Vault.com uses a WYSIWYG toolbar editor when staff submit news, and therefore the news posts may have more complicated and obfuscated HTML tags for the Infolinks JavaScript to parse, but that doesn’t really seem to make sense when you consider that these same news posts appear fine when on their individual pages…

Whatever the reason, this bug was never fixed, nor did I ever receive any update about the progress of it from customer support.

I should mention that the underline links appeared fine everywhere else throughout the site.

Income Analysis

Ah, the most important part. While everything I mentioned above is important, in the end the only thing that really matters in an ad network is how much money it can make you.

The reports page on Infolinks is pretty simple, but has all the basic information and date functions you need. However, one thing that is a bit of a pet peeve for me is that the reports aren’t live or even updated hourly. Instead, you can only receive stats up to the previous day.

This is obviously not a big issue, but for those who love checking their stats like me, this is a bit difficult to get used to. I don’t see why the reports can’t be made live or at least updated hourly, so it’d be nice if this would be changed in the future.

Anyway, I started receiving ad impressions on February 19th and ran Infolinks on my two sites until the end of the month, although I did remove the code for several days on CookingForums while the ‘back button’ bug was present. I also set Infolinks on both sites to show the maximum amount of ads available, in order to see the maximum I could make.

Things started off great. After only having put Infolinks on my sites for half a day, I saw a $5.72 eCPM on CookingForums.net! This is a huge eCPM and so when I saw it I was naturally quite surprised and optimistic. However, it was odd that Movie-Vault.com only had a $0.66 eCPM in comparison:

However, things quickly changed for the worse. While the following couple days saw an average of an $0.89 eCPM, the 4 days thereafter showed a combined total of $0 (for my CookingForums.net site)!

At first, I thought this was undoubtedly a bug on Infolinks end and was naturally rather annoyed, but then I remembered that Infolinks pays on a CPC basis and not CPM. Therefore, these stats could be legitimate, and I just didn’t have a single person click on an add during those 4 days.

It’s certainly possible, but it’s also uncharacteristic as my daily click average at the end of my testing phase turned out to be 5 per day. So, it’s rather strange that I didn’t receive a single click during those 4 days when statistically I should have received around 20…

This is why I believe there was some type of bug that occurred during those 4 days, although I don’t have concrete proof to back it up since my sample traffic data is quite low.

I continued to let Infolinks run uninterrupted until the end of the month, and you can see the overall results below:

While there were days with a $1.58 eCPM and a $0.99 eCPM, the average ended up being $0.49. Now, if that was the eCPM for a traditional banner, then it would be an okay rate, but I personally consider In-Text ad links such as Infolinks to be more intrusive than the typical banner since the ads are directly entrenched within your site’s text, and so I therefore expect higher rates.

I wrote the majority of this review last night, and am finishing it this morning. Out of curiosity, I decided to check yesterday’s stats a couple of minutes ago, and was surprised to find another high eCPM, akin to what occurred on the very first day.

It showed a $3.58 eCPM for Movie-Vault.com (the stats below are only for Movie-Vault.com) which is great!

Now, this could easily be explained by somehow getting a click (or two) on a very high-priced keyword or keyword phrase. After all, people have received as high as $20 CPC’s from Google AdSense before. So that is probably what happened. My average CPC is $0.27, and if we estimate that it was just 1 ‘superclick’ that occurred yesterday, then it would have paid out $2.77 for that one click.

Below are the overall stats that occurred between CookingForums.net and Movie-Vault.com during a period of 10 days (impressions didn’t begin to appear until the 19th):

I ended up averaging only $0.49 eCPM which is too low for my liking considering the types of ads.

Referring back to my Bugs section above, if Infolinks provided actual relevant ads with working images that are bug-free, then I would expect the CTR to increase dramatically which would in turn increase the overall eCPM dramatically as well.

I should mention that I used the dotted underline style on both of my sites and the Infolinks customer support did mention the following to me:

“I would suggest that you use double underline for your highlighted links. We recommend you choose double underline as it’s considered less intrusive (since it isn’t confused with regular hyperlinks). Double-underline will get higher quality, better paying ads. Our experience shows that in general double-underline generates higher revenues than single line.”

So I wonder if that explains for my lower eCPM. But I do disagree with “it’s considered less intrusive” as double underlines to me are just so incredibly ugly.

But I’m now curious if advertisers actually pay a premium for double underlines, and/or if advertisers can bid differently depending on the underline styles. This is something I’d be interested in getting an official response on.

Summary

While I went into my review process of Infolinks with an open mind, having been admittedly biased against In-Text ad networks, my experience during the past 2-weeks only reinforced my negative disposition towards them.

While they claim high relevancy, I saw very little (almost none) during my test run. Improving the ad relevancy is the #1 thing that Infolinks should focus on. There are also many bugs that need to be ironed out, and they seem to be simple fixes so I’d like to see those eliminated or at least improved.

Customer support was a hit and miss.

Registration and ad implementation was fast and easy, and their system is very basic and simple to use. Ad customization was also simple to implement.

Earnings were rather unpredictable, with some days having fantastic eCPM’s as high as $5.50+ yet some others with as low as $0.

I gave Infolinks an honest shot, but they’re going to need to fix the bugs I wrote about and address many of the other issues I brought up in order for me to try them again.

To be fair, out of all the In-Text ad networks, I do think I like Infolinks the best. Even though their payouts weren’t too great, they did appear to pay better than their competition. But that’s not saying a whole lot…

I’d be happy to do another paid review of Infolinks if they do decide to improve and work on things.

I actually hope they do seriously heed some of my advice as I actually do want to use them. Those were some nice eCPM’s! If I could average a $5 eCPM with them I’d be extremely happy and would most likely use them on all of my sites and promote them.

I’m pretty confident I could refer 300-400 publishers to them so it’s really in their best interest to get me on board 🙂

71 Responses to “An In-Depth Review and Case Study of Infolinks”

Not a fan of In-Text ads at all. First off, on websites I visit I find them very annoying especially if you accidentally scroll over 1. Second, the payouts suck and the relevancy of the ads sucks. Kontera was my first and last try at In-text ads.

It’s whatever to me actually. If I’m getting good content I don’t mind that much. What I can’t stand are flash banner ads. They slow down my browser even when I close the tab – I have to close the whole browser to free up the memory.

Infolinks is awesome….inline ads work really well so long as you know how to use them. Visitors become blind to the ads if they look like green kontera links…and you have to choose the ad category that is most appropriate for your site. i’ve never made less than $1.00 per day with infolinks. I have under 1,000 page views a day (about 200 ppl per day). Make sure your site is good when it comes to SEO…then the inline ads will be VERY relevant.

I hate in text advertising with a passion. They are easily one of the most annoying ads ever created. I have a habit of moving my mouse down the page as I am reading something and whenever one pops up it just frustrates me. I close it and never look at it.

I agree with the comments above. In-text ads are horrible! They managed to make an ad system that makes a site look uglier than google adsense does. I would never put these kinds of ads on any website I manage. Sure you might get a buck or two here and there, but you are paying for it by giving everyone a bad impression of your site. When I see these annoying in-text ads littered across a page, it screams ‘amateur spam’.

I’ve been using them for about 9 months. I’ll share my experiences on my blog in the coming week as well. I agree with your opinions about the ad targeting though. I’ll share my income from over 400k impressions on my blog when I have time to post the review later this week.

Believe it or not, I applied to be one of their tech support peeps while in Israel last year. With 4 years of customer service support experience and programming knowledge they didn’t hire me. Must be why their tech support is so shoddy now. 😉

I’ve tried it on a couple of my blogs but rarely got cliecks and when I did they were a maximum of 10cents. I’d be interesting in reading your review Chris because with that many impressions you can give a really detailed overview!

I can’t really tolerate the ads that pop up as hyperlinks on random words. Really cheapens the site in my eyes as it totally ruins the reading experience. Most of my friends have moved away from it too.

This is Shay from Infolinks and I am happy to join this challenging discussion.

From my experience in the In Text Advertising industry and with many surveys and studies I read and conducted, I can assure you that In Text advertising has become a legitimate and significantly profitable method of contextual advertising.

Online publishers web-wide use to complement their contextual advertising earnings stream, with In Text advertising. In fact, nowadays the combination of Google AdSense and Infolinks is considered the highest paying model for content based website.

About the relevancy of the ads, Infolinks displays millions of different in text ads every day. Our smart Algorithm semantically scans the web and matches the most relevant ads to the most profitable keywords.

But as you know, sometimes even the smartest robots make mistakes. Therefore, we constantly work on improving this match to get better and better results.

For more info about these matters, just Google Infolinks and see for yourself…

I cannot believe what Infolinks says ever. Reason they email me saying they will beat Kontera’s CPM making me a Premium Publisher with 2.5$ CPM Guaranteed which didnt work for more than a few days and again back to cents.

Great review Tyler, you really do give an in-depth report on the system. I had a similar experience with Kontera, and never gave these types of links another look. The biggest problem I faced was relevancy.

I didn’t see you mention it in your review, but what’s their minimum payout? With Kontera, I was forced to run it for quite a few months, so I could finally hit $100 and cash out.

Every site I’ve tried them on the eCPM has turned out to be in the same ballpark as Adsense, which is way above Kontera, Adbrite and the others.

I also don’t like in-text ads, then again I’ve never met a single webmaster who likes any adverts on any site. Every ad “cheapens” content. General visitors are a little different, I’ve never noticed any negative statistic change after implementing in-text advertising, certainly no more so than chucking an Adsense block on a page. Sometimes it pays to remember who your audience is, for 99.99% of websites the audience is not made up mainly of other website owners.

With 0.50 eCPM, thats just not good enough for something that annoys the hell out of visitors. Really i only ever see these types of links on auto generated pages, or things like squidoo etc. Where there is no need for visitor retention.

Good point about visitor retention. Blanketing your sites with crap links like this is a surefire way to make sure people don’t want to come back to your sites. Sure some niches will be oblivious to these types of ads, but the average web surfer doesn’t want to see these junk ads.

[…] on the lookout for new money-making opportunities. In one of his most recent posts, he provides an in-depth review of InfoLinks including a full case study. How do you feel about in-text advertising? Has it been successful for […]

Wow now that was a review, Tyler! at first I thought your bias was shining through, but you have given InfoLinks a lot of golden advice. If I was infolinks, I’d fix what you said plus over deliver and then come back for another review.

InfoLinks, keep up the good work so far and I bet you can dominate the text link niche in the near future.. especially with Tyler on your side.

I appreciate your comments and questions about Infolinks and In Text advertising. I am happy to take part in this rousing discussion and reply to any comment about our product.

I honestly believe that our product is not intrusive at all! As oppose to annoying pop ups and glowing banners, In text advertising does not distract readers from your content. The bubble ad opens just when the readers hover over it. When they move the cursor away, the bubble immediately disappears.

Website owners can fully customize their In Text ads to match the look and feel of their website. In text advertising enables online publishers to keep contributing quality content to the web for the enjoyment of us all.

Since its establishment, Infolinks keeps its promise to pay its publishers the highest revenue share, while constantly improving our algorithm to improve the quality of the ads.

Please feel free to respond with any further question about Infolinks and In Text ads.

If I’m getting good content I don’t mind that much. What I can’t stand are flash banner ads. They slow down my browser even when I close the tab – I have to close the whole browser to free up the memory.

This is Jonathan from Kontera. Wow, this is a really a really throughout review, I’m impressed.

I think if you took an equally close look at our service, you’d see that Kontera actually has a lot more to offer over competing networks such as Infolinks.

First of all, and this speaks to your issues with relevancy, Kontera’s contextual algorithm ensures that people using our network are delivered the most relevant ads possible. Rather than just scan for keywords, which is what competitors like Infolinks do, Kontera can actually read your webpages for meaning, leading to higher CTR, better CPC, and less “Cameron Diaz” 😉

Kontera also offers an exclusive ad inventory from such globally recognized brand names as Microsoft, Sprint, L’Oreal, Blackberry, Volvo, National Geographic, and more. These premium, often Rich-Media ads are the most attractive to site visitors, offer the best possible CPC, and are only available through Kontera. Infolinks in contrast solely relies on generic ad feeds, and has no unique ad units to offer.

Here at Kontera, we’re currently offering new publishers a 70% revenue share, which is the best rate in the industry. Additionally we’re offering new publishers a $50 bonus if they get at least 25,000 U.S. page views during their first 30 days on the network; and have recently lowered our minimum payout threshold from $100 to $50, across all payout methods. The current Infolinks payout minimum varies between $50-$400.

Tyler, even though the rate is meant primarily for new publishers, if you contact me by e-mail, I’d be happy to give you the 70% revenue share rate, and you can see how well Kontera can work for you. Alternately, you can learn more about our network on our Publisher Page: http://www.kontera.com/publishers

Since March 15, Infolinks ads from appearing on my site. I have checked against the script but there is no problem. I tried to see the sites that participate in the program Infolinks Ads, it also experienced the same like me.
Can you explain all this.

i dont know whats wrong with infolinks 🙁 i installled it one week back…..the max ecpm i got was 0.3 $ and u wont believe from 2 days its 0.0($ 🙁 i have around 300-350 clicks daily still so less earning with infolinks 🙁 i dont know why their cpc differ so much specially on wekends its pathetically low.help me 😕

I hate those pop up ads on web pages as I’m trying to read test, I exit any website that uses then. We should write bots that click up billions of these ads to drive up the cost to advertisers so high that they are not useful any more.

[…] There are a number of companies that provide in-text link partnership opportunities, including InfoLinks and Vibrant. Revenue Potential: In-text links can become a significant driver of revenue if implemented correctly. Some bloggers have experienced CPMs as high as $10 on these placements alone. For more details, check out Tyler Cruz’s detailed review of InfoLinks. […]

But according to me, none of the adsense alternative can give the revenue as much as Adsense can give. I tried infolinks and I had worst experience with it. After having huge amount of traffic, I was able to make only 100-200$.

Because my blog was banned by Adsense. If this wasn’t happened then that traffic can surely make around $2k+.

That’s why infolinks is far away from Adsense in terms of generating revenue.

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